During the holidays, many people enjoy their free time and spend it at home with their family. But for some of us, it is still business as usual. During the busiest time of the year, visitor management can get even more challenging for business owners and operators.
Although employees prefer flexibility during the holidays, and more than normal will take paid time off, it shouldn’t be a problem if only a few people are left onsite during these times—as long as you create an effective plan to manage holiday visitors.
The best way to handle the challenge of visitor management during the peak holiday season is to utilize advanced tools, such as digital virtual management software. The best visitor management systems are fully customizable to accurately represent your brand and fulfill all your reception needs.
With an influx of potential deliveries and clients expected to visit during the holidays, it’s always better to be prepared by utilizing cost-effective solutions. Having the right visitor management system is kind of like having a virtual receptionist. Instead of countless hours of training and outsourcing jobs to third parties you can easily set it up and manage every visitor going in and out of your business.
What a visitor thinks about a company relies a lot on their first impression. Visitor management systems are excellent for communicating with visitors, whether you are physically in the place of business or you are working remotely. From inviting and preregistering the visitor, greeting the visitor to walking them through the process, great communication is always key to a good business-consumer relationship.
When the holidays arise and with more visitors coming in and out of the workplace, it may be hard to keep track of and communicate with each and every one of them. And that is where reliable visitor management software comes into play.
During the holiday season, many employees take their vacation leaves to spend time on their personal affairs, which can get confusing for business operation managers. Each employee has their own set of skills, strengths, and weaknesses.
In order to delegate tasks and select the right person to execute these tasks during the busiest time of the year, it’s always best to know which employees are onsite and utilize their strengths for more effective visitor management.
Although receptionists have been doing stellar jobs in the past years, people tend to make mistakes, especially during busy seasons such as the holidays. With that said, visitor management systems offer highly effective receptionist tools as an alternative— whether it’s the holiday season or not.
Other benefits of implementing an effective visitor management system all year round include:
Traditional visitor management methods such as hiring multiple receptionists with alternating shifts can cost a lot of money. The average annual salary of a receptionist is almost $37,000, not to mention how time-consuming it is to fix their schedules, especially during the holidays.
With a self-service visitor management system, you are significantly cutting down costs while increasing the effectiveness of visitor management. Although, having advanced tools and self-check-in kiosks for visitors does not affect the projected demand for receptionists in the upcoming years.
Whether there is another pandemic or circumstance that will require hybrid working schedules, effective visitor management software runs 24/7. This will allow businesses to operate normally even with fewer people on-site at any time of the day, and any day of the week.
Visitors can self-check in, get visitor badges, get building directions, and most of all—get a professional first impression of the company.
Many companies rely on software for their operations and communications, and most visitor management software options are built with third-party software integrations. With this technology, you can link communications software, like Slack, Teams, and Google Chat, directory services software, for example, on-premise Active Directory or Azure AD, Google Workspace, Rippling, essensys, and others, and more to your visitor management software to flesh out operations.
Since many workers prefer staying at home during the holidays, it makes visitor management a lot more challenging for operation managers. With that being said, the benefits of having automated tools such as visitor management software can significantly help companies handle a large volume of visitors, even in a hybrid workplace where only a few people are left onsite.
In addition to convenience, receptionist software such as self-service visitor management promotes workplace safety, creates better impressions on the company, and ensures effective tracking of visitors coming in and out of the workplace.